09. Mr. Why and the Digital Minimalist

Cal Newport on Coaching For Leaders, Becoming Mr. Why on Troubleshooting Agile, Gary Pedretti and Jeff Gothelf on Agile For Humans, Thai Wood on Greater Than Code, and Jeff Campbell on Scrum Master Toolbox.

I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email [email protected].

This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting April 15, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers.

CAL NEWPORT ON COACHING FOR LEADERS

The Coaching For Leaders podcast featured Cal Newport with host Dave Stachowiak. Cal talked about the inspiration for his new book Digital Minimalism having come from readers of his previous book Deep Work who liked what that book had done for their work lives and asked, “What about my personal life?” Dave and Cal talked about competitive Rock, Paper, Scissors, and how the top competitors in that sport are so good at understanding and taking advantage of the way our brains work. This took them to the main point of the book, which is that technologies like social media are not understood by our brains in the same way as true social interaction, so we can be interacting on social media all day long and still feel lonely.

Dave asked about the impact the modern tendency to replace face-to-face conversation with virtual connection such as email, text, and social media likes, can have for leaders. Cal described the scenario in which a person in a leadership position with a remote component to it reads, say, an email and can’t put a finger on the emotional affect — she can’t tell whether the author of the email is really angry with her or really happy. He says we need the complex, social-processing part of the brain that relies on analog cues such as the back-and-forth of hearing a voice or seeing body language. It is how we understand people, connect with people, and coordinate with people towards common goals. Taking this kind of conversation out of the picture makes it difficult to be a leader.

Dave asked what Cal learned from his readers and blog followers. Cal said he was surprised to learn from his readers and followers the degree to which digital distraction was filling a void for them. He had assumed that simply reducing or taming the digital distractions would allow us to immediately get back to the things we know are more important. He learned instead that, for a lot of people, it is unclear what they are going to do next once they have taken the lightweight distraction out of their lives. He says he is much more sympathetic now about the difficulty of figuring out what you want to do instead of just mindless swiping in every down moment. In the book, he asks people to take a 30-day period to limit social media use and he said, “People are often surprised by how little they miss things like Facebook during this process and also surprised by how much they’re at a loss to figure out what they should be doing instead.”

iTune link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/400-how-to-reclaim-conversation-with-cal-newport/id458827716?i=1000432139932&mt=2

Website link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/400/

BECOMING MR. WHY ON TROUBLESHOOTING AGILE

The Troubleshooting Agile podcast with hosts Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick spent an episode talking about someone they call “Mr. Why.” Squirrel told a story about a client who would get orders from on high that said, “Thou shalt do it this way.” He would also get orders with explanations that do not make any sense such as investors making technical decisions. Squirrel calls this client “Mr. Why” because most people in these types of environments eventually stop asking the why. The challenge for this client is not that he doesn’t ask why but that he only asks himself.

Squirrel said that he tells Mr. Why that we want to be opposite of lawyers, who are carefully trained never to ask the question, “Why?” Jeffrey said that he thinks the legalistic type of question is the model that people often think is the proper way to analyze a situation: legalistically building a case rather than collaboratively trying to get to answers and this could be why people fall into communication patterns in which their goal is to win rather than to jointly discover. To me, this sounds exactly like the difference between constructive and deconstructive criticism described in the book, How The Way We Talk Can Change The Way We Work by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey. The constructive criticizer is making an airtight case about the behavior he or she is criticizing even when doing so constructively, while the deconstructive criticizer is seeking to jointly discover the truth with the help of the recipient of the criticism.

iTune link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/becoming-mr-why/id1327456890?i=1000432455338&mt=2

SoundCloud link: https://soundcloud.com/troubleshootingagile/becoming-mr-why

GARY PEDRETTI AND JEFF GOTHELF ON AGILE FOR HUMANS

The Agile For Humans podcast featured Gary Pedretti and Jeff Gothelf with host Ryan Ripley. Ryan asked a question that he hears a lot: how do we do UX activities and product discovery within a sprint? Gary says that from the developer community, he hears that design work takes too long. From the designer community, he hears that they think their work is strategic and sprints feel tactical or that they think developers don’t really care about design. Jeff pointed out that the fundamental values and principles of Scrum and UX are the same, but melding the processes in a way that respects both Scrum and UX has proved elusive for a lot of organizations.

They talked about a 2007 paper by Desirée Sy and Lynn Miller on staggered sprints that was misunderstood as a series of mini-waterfalls. I believe Jeff was referring to the article named Adapting Usability Investigations for Agile User-centered Design. Jeff explained that they were actually describing two kinds of work being done by the same team, not by separate groups of designers and developers communicating by handoff. 

Jeff described experimenting with his team’s processes back in 2008-09 and settling on a process in which designers were part of the Scrum team with engineers and product managers and work was prioritized not just on what needed to be delivered but also on what the team was trying to learn.

Gary talked about how the separation of designers from the rest of the team is similar to the separation of database people and application architects from the rest of the team because of a belief that the work of the database designer or application architect needed to be completed before the work of the rest of the team could begin. In each case, people discovered patterns that overcame this limitation, like the patterns of Ambler and Sadalage’s Refactoring Databases book and the patterns of evolutionary or emergent architecture.

iTune link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/afh-106-exploring-user-experience-and-scrum/id991671232?i=1000433513601&mt=2

Website link: https://ryanripley.com/afh-106-exploring-user-experience-and-scrum/

THAI WOOD ON GREATER THAN CODE

The Greater Than Code podcast featured Thai Wood with hosts Jessica Kerr, Sam Livingston-Gray, John K Sawers, and Avdi Grimm. They started with a discussion of resilience engineering and how it spun off of human factors and brought in cognitive systems. Jessica said that old-style human factors got mired in Taylorism whereas cognitive systems is about making systems that work with people in the way that people naturally work.

Thai had gotten into tech coming from emergency medicine as an EMT. Jessica asked what he brought to software development from his EMT days. Thai responded that, in medicine, you are trained about burnout, how to identify it, and what resources are available to help with it. In software, despite similar stressors and similar problems, burnout is not talked about that much.

Jessica asked Thai how to distinguish between reliability and resilience. Thai said that resilience encompasses the ability to continually adapt to change, whereas reliability might be consistently performing within the same state. He also said that he thinks of robustness as being able to survive certain inputs but not necessarily being able to adapt to them.

iTune link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/121-emergency-communication-with-thai-wood/id1163023878?i=1000431679618&mt=2

Website link: https://www.greaterthancode.com/emergency-communication

JEFF CAMPBELL ON SCRUM MASTER TOOLBOX

The Scrum Master Toolbox podcast featured Jeff Campbell with host Vasco Duarte. This episode was the first to be done in a Q & A format. The question for this episode was: Have you been able to break through the proverbial IT gate and start talking about wider Agile adoption together with management?

Jeff answered that being able to communicate with management is probably one of the most important factors to success. He told the story of working at a company that went out of business. Reflecting on this period of his career, he arrived at the idea that, if he was unable to convince management that a particular behavior or practice was important, then that was his failing and not theirs. His recommendation for a person looking to influence management is that they should start doing public speaking and teaching. Exposure to teaching, he says, teaches you to be able to express yourself multiple different ways which is critical because not everybody comes to understand a topic the same way.

iTune link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/selling-agile-how-to-get-buy-in-from-management-q-jeff/id963592988?i=1000431928436&mt=2

Website link: https://scrum-master-toolbox.org/2019/03/podcast/selling-agile-how-to-get-buy-in-from-management-qa-with-jeff-campbell/

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Intro/outro music: "waste time" by Vincent Augustus